Husband Dan Gasby has a new girlfriend, and B.’s fans are furious.
In 2013, at 63, Barbara Smith, the media mogul trademarked “B. Smith,” whom many deemed “the black Martha Stewart,” was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The illness is particularly common among African Americans and, as
The Washington Post’s features reporter Lavanya Ramanatha detailed in a recent article, “It struck B. Smith at her prime; it ravaged her brain, jumbling her memories, turning her sentences into alphabet soup.”
It’s hard to reconcile this reported decline with the huge persona that was the epitome of elegance and style 20 years ago. B. Smith was “hot property.” She was on TV and the cover of magazines; she wrote books, had various business enterprises including restaurants; she seemingly had it all, including Dan Gasby, a loving, supportive husband.
In the six years since B.’s diagnosis, Gasby has increasingly turned to social media to share the realities of caring for a spouse with a terminal illness, someone in decline who has literally forgotten who he is.
Not seemingly inclined to hold anything back, Gasby, perhaps, overshares. Likely, for him, his activities on social media lends catharsis. He has detailed the fear B. developed, her anger and frustration, and his own. His posts reflect the weight of B.’s care even though he’s had the support of daughter, Dana, from a previous marriage, whom B. helped to raise. Some perceived Gasby’s own emotional health was in a downward spiral. Fans were very supportive.
Until December.
By Ramanatha’s account, Gasby posted to Facebook a photo of himself, out to dinner with a blond named Alex Lerner. The caption, in retrospect, may have been ill-advised. “Hate it or love it,” it read, referencing an old rap song by 50 Cent and The Game. “You can debate, but for me, I’m feelin’ great.” His #whylie hashtag, suggesting he was sexy and available, did not aid his cause.
At 64, Gasby was essentially announcing to the world — and B.’s fans in particular — that, although he had a wife, whom he still loved and would continue to care for, he had moved on romantically with the blessing of his daughter. After several years of angst, despair and emotional isolation, he was happy again — in love, he said — and now had additional help and emotional support to care for B.
B.’s fans have been apoplectic. Gasby has been unabashedly unapologetic, the stand-off simply vicious. The appearance of girlfriend Alex living, if only part time, under the same roof with him and B. has been decried as disrespectful. Some of B.’s fans, in fact, are calling for court intervention, a petition, anything that might “save her” from what looks, to them, at best, like cruelty and, at worst, predation.
Nicholas Spark’s pop culture classic, The Notebook, has seemingly defined what love under such conditions should look like. According to the bar set by leading character, “Noah,” Gasby is failing miserably as a husband and decent human being. But is such a overtly romanticized fictional account of caring for a spouse with a debilitating, terminal illness realistic?
“It riles Dan,” Ramanatha writes, “to hear how many of them [B.’s fans] assume he’s some kind of Svengali, manipulating B., living off his wife’s success, when he’d helped make it reality.”
Moreover, those who know Dan and B. personally actually defend his new relationship.
“Anybody that would judge Dan knows nothing about the disease and the toll it takes,” said Michael Schnayerson, the journalist who co-wrote the couple’s 2015 book on Alzheimer’s, Before I Forget. “If you can find a companion who can help you get through that, all power to you.”
As someone who has actually lived through the nightmare of walking alongside a beloved spouse through cancer and all that such a terminal illness involves, I can certainly empathize with Gasby.
My situation was different. We were newlyweds when my beloved husband was diagnosed just six months into our marriage. It was a devastating development made more so because we had been college sweethearts who had lost touch with each other for 22 years prior to our “second chance.”
I became my husband’s advocate and caretaker for almost five years, remaining physically and emotionally faithful to him until his death in 2009. And please do not misunderstand. It was definitely not a one-way street. My relationship with my husband restored my sense of self, which had been devastated in a previous marriage, a marriage that should have ended two weeks after it began. Regardless, one thing was very clear: Even though our relationship had been redefined, almost from the moment of diagnosis, as caregiver, I was never really given “permission” to grieve the loss of our relationship until my husband died.
That had serious personal consequences, which I will expand upon at another, more appropriate time. However, I detail my experience to say that, unless you have truly walked in another man’s shoes, hold your judgment. Save it for the things you truly know about and with which you have direct experience. That may sound harsh. But the moral arc of the universe tends toward helping us understand the circumstances in which we stand in judgment of others.
Isn’t that what Karma is all about?
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© Copyright 2019 Donna Kassin. All rights reserved.
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PHOTO COURTESY: The Washington Informer (Heather Weston II).
RELATED ARTICLE: Alzheimer’s is a cruel thief. Don’t blame caregivers for still finding joy. By Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, author of the novel “The Wrong Side of Night.”
“…Alzheimer’s is a cruel thief. It steals the past as well as the future. I watched my father’s eyes grow more and more distant as the disease progressed until he was somewhere so far away, I could only pray that he was content there. We need people such as Dan Gasby to show us that there can still be life, and joy, and promise in what appears to be a bleak, unforgiving landscape.
There is no cure for Alzheimer’s at this point, but there are ways to stand up to its piracy. Opening one’s heart to new love in the midst of grief, saying to the disease, You will not steal my life, too, is a light on the path of a very dark journey…”
RELATED VIDEO: SuperSoul Original Short: Living for the Moment with Alzheimer’s | SuperSoul Sunday | OWN
